Video: Jon Blow on 'The Truth in Game Design'

Courtesy of the GDC Vault is this free lecture by Jonathan Blow from the Game Developers Conference Europe 2011. Here he looks at Conway's Game of Life and his own games, Braid and the upcoming The Witness, to explore a different way to approach game design. More ideas came out of the development process and ended up in Braid than what was put into it, says Blow. By leaving it up to the system of the game to answer the questions behind Braid, starting with what happens when the player can reverse time, he was able to observe what interesting things could happen rather than force predetermined things to happen. Session Name: Truth in Game Design Speaker(s): Jonathan Blow Company Name(s): Number None, Inc. Track / Format: Game Design Overview:We illustrate that games, being algorithmic systems implemented on computers, are biased toward revealing truth, so long as we do not quash the truth in order to force our own high-level wishes into the design. We can use games as instruments, like telescopes or elec-tron microscopes, to observe aspects of the universe that we would not normally have access to.

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